Learner Agency: Tilting to a Support Model That Empowers Performance

As we head into a future of hybridization and a new world of work, it’s clear that a traditional, top-down learning model of control and compliance can no longer sustain the results that drive employee performance. If we want our learning organizations to be innovative, responsive, and targeted to ensure impact, we must find new ways of empowering learners with the agency and support they need to succeed.

Based on our research findings from McKinsey’s Research and Innovation (R&I) Learning Lab, we learned that in the age of disruption, learning functions will be required to tilt from prescriptive learning to an approach that enables learner agency. In this session, we will share insights and intentional practices that foster learner agency. We will facilitate peer-to-peer discussions to get into deeper reflection on a few dimensions of our research including:

• How to create an inclusive social structure
• Moving  beyond the reliance of “collision moments”
• Distributing teaching and learning practices among your organization

Your discussions and reflections will help you explore how your organization can better enable learner agency—putting empowerment, not content, at the center of the learning strategy. Doing so will help you move toward achieving meaningful and sustainable change, not just in difficult times or remote environments but always.

In this session, you will learn:

• Highlights of our learner agency research that progressively maps out three dimensions and grades of empowerment
• Tactical advice and tips on how to empower learner agency
• A framework of recommendations and tools that shift ownership and control to learners